Ill-met by gaslight

What is it about Victorian murders that so grips us? The enduring fascination of Jack the Ripper caught the imagination of the American thriller writer Patricia Cornwell to such an extent that she allegedly spent more than $6 million of her own money examining the case and producing two books on the subject. (She thinks the killer was the artist Walter Sickert.) Meanwhile, Bruce Robinson, the writer and director of Withnail and I, devoted 15 years to Ripper studies: the result, They All Love Jack, is a gloriously labyrinthine, closely argued whopper of a book, rich with conspiracy theories about freemasons and the police. (He proposes another culprit, the songwriter Michael Maybrick.)

Obscurer 19th-century cases have been the subject of Kate Summerscale’s two excellent reinvestigations, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and The Wicked Boy. A film of Peter Ackroyd’s period novel, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is newly released. And now Sinclair McKay has jumped into the ring with The Mile End Murder.

Most of the crimes described in the books above took place in the East End of London. Its dank alleyways, poorly lit byways and pestilent passages are the stuff of lurid popular imagination. McKay is excellent at evoking the flavour — and, regrettably, the smells — of the area. Like Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, he describes dust heaps as high as houses, children running errands and misers rent-collecting. Lit only by candles and gaslight, this East End is murky, over-crowded and full of shadows.

As in all the best Agatha Christies, the person who is murdered here is so universally disliked that suspicion may fall on almost anybody who knew her. Despite owning huge swathes of property, the widowed Mary Emsley employs no servants, living alone in a house she keeps locked and shuttered at night.